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At The Talkhouse, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty director Terence Nance on Ryan Gosling’s Lost River:

Even with this current cut, I can tell you FOR SURE that if an unknown filmmaker had put this exact cut of the film out and premiered it at Sundance or Cannes or somewhere like that, critics would love it, the reviews would be laden with… “how did he do that” and “he’s sooo formally ambitious” because he would be allowed to make the mistakes that all first time white guy feature filmmakers are allowed to make, i.e. making the movie too long, miscasting a few roles, but overall finishing something that is producorially and conceptually ambitious. The rough cut of this movie is definitely more exciting in terms of a new directorial voice than half of the films I see at festivals.

No conversation about artificial intelligence in movies is complete without the inclusion of Ridley Scott‘s 1982 classic, Blade Runner. It’s a character-driven, sci-fi/noir about a detective tasked with locating and “retiring” replicants — genetically engineered humanoids created to work as slave labor or serve as entertainment — who’ve violently rebelled against their human masters in a bid for freedom. Rather than simply view the replicants as monsters the film embraces the idea that they’re perhaps even more human than humans.

Odd Man Out, Carol Reed’s first masterpiece, introduced the theme that would shape all of his best films: a stranger’s groping quest through the labyrinth of a great city. The little French boy left to his own confused devices in London (The Fallen Idol), the naive American blundering through occupied Vienna (The Third Man), the sheltered but curious English girl venturing into East Berlin (The Man Between), each gets lost in a deceptive, tilting world. In Odd Man Out (1947), the dying Irish rebel is not in a foreign land, he is an outsider in his own hometown. He wanders among housewives and bartenders, soldiers and urchins, priests and drunken painters, but his progress through a single winter night has mythic ­resonance—an odyssey through the borderland between life and death.